Oil drilling will not harm polar bears

US officials defended plans for oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea off northwestern Alaska, telling lawmakers that it would not harm polar bears, already threatened by global warming [?]. Randall Luthi, director of the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which sells oil drilling rights, told Congress Thursday that the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act provides adequate safeguards to polar bears from oil exploration accidents such as oil spills.


[?] = fact? : "Fact: Polar Bears are not going extinct because of the supposedly melting ice, according to a biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the arctic government of Nunavut. “Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present,” Taylor wrote on May 1, 2006. See here: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1146433819696&call_pageid=970599119419

[nonetheless]: Representative Edward Markey demanded polar bears be declared a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act due to global warming prior to the sale of oil drilling rights in the Chukchi Sea, scheduled for February 6.

[and so our ever-increasing oil dollars continue to flow to our middle-eastern 'friends', while driving up the costs of virtually everything in our economy...]

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080118092115.otnxbhdn&show_article=1&catnum=7